February 2009

Gehlen Research: Primary Documents Jackpot

As I have discussed before, I am doing a research project on the former German spymaster Reinhard Gehlen and the organization that he established after the second World War which eventually became the West German (and now just German) Bundesnachrichtendienst, or Federal Intelligence Service. The rel...

LibraryThing

So I broke down and decided to catalog my ever-growing personal library. I chose to use an online tool called LibraryThing because it seemed like a good way of keeping track of everything. There are other tools out there that I considered, many of which are offline, however most of the cost money an...

Oldest English Words

The BBC is running an interesting article about the oldest words in the English language. Researchers are currently saying that they believe the oldest words still in use in modern English are “I”, “we”, “two” and “three” which date back tens of thousa...

David Irving’s Translation of Der Dienst: Erinnerungen 1942-1971

For anyone who is going to be working with the memoirs of Reinhard Gehlen, do not use David Irving’s translation of it, entitled: The Service: The Memoirs of General Reinhard Gehlen. For a project I am working on, I have been dealing with both Irving’s translation as well as the original...

“Beware the Inventor”

I found something quite amusing from an 1865 Boston newspaper: A man about 43 years of age giving the name Joshua Coppersmith has been arrested for attempting to extort funds from ignorant and superstitious people by exhibiting a device which he says will convey the human voice any distance over met...

Happy Birthday, Mr. Lincoln!

Today marks the 200th anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln’s birth. He was born on February 12, 1809 in a one-room cabin in Hardin County, Kentucky. If you are interested there is some interesting information regarding some photos recently of Lincoln’s second inauguration. I’ve...

Contact is important, but what about the other tens of thousands of years?

I have to say that I am quite disappointed with my Native American Studies class this semester. I was (apparently naively) assuming that we would focus more on Native American culture and more on the history of the Native American peoples before first contact with the European nations. I was, howeve...

Reinhard Gehlen

This semester I am taking a historical methods class in which the focus is the history of espionage. In this class, we are required to choose a topic related to the history of intelligence and do a research paper based on that. The topic I have chosen to do is Reinhard Gehlen who held a...

Translation Services

This really has nothing to do with history, but I thought I would be a staunch self-promoter here as well as my other blogs: As part of my on going adventures with the German language, I provide translation services from both German to English and English to German. If you are looking for someone wh...